Berlin-based electronic artist Lotic is from the school of fractured beat-makers like Arca, Sophie and Elysia Crampton who elude genre and gender boundaries – and whose blunt, mechanistic club creations are not for the faint of heart. According to Lotic, who prefers to use the pronoun “they”, their debut album is less abrasive than previous material, making the unlistenable danceable. Bulletproof’s toppling drums suggest a ninja running across rooftops, while The Warp and the Weft is the gnarliest attack of gabba since DJ Scotch Egg. Hunted, meanwhile, is an intriguing slice of ghostly gospel with sinister whispers of “brown skin, masculine frame/ head’s a target”.
It’s easy to hear why Björk is a fan: Lotic’s baroque shimmer-strings have a similar synthetically sweet quality to Arca’s co-production on her albums Vulnicura and Utopia. And like Vulnicura – as track titles such as Resilience, with its chainsaw-savage groove, and smoky ballad Solace suggest – this is an album about finding inner strength. The result is a fearless and powerful debut.
